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It’s been eight years since the publication of Gargoyles, the last short story collection from Victoria writer and teacher Bill Gaston. Since that volume, which was nominated for the Governor General’s Award, Gaston has published Midnight Hockey, a non-fiction quasi-memoir about playing beer-league hockey (also 2006) and two novels, including The World, in 2012, which was awarded the Ethel Wilson Prize for Fiction. It’s an impressive run of work, and a solid indicator of why Gaston is regarded as one of this country’s finest writers.

I hadn’t realized just how much I missed his short fiction, however, until I opened his new collection, Juliet Was a Surprise. Within a few sentences I was reminded, though it took me somewhat longer to figure out just what separated Gaston’s short stories from his longer fiction. The attention to detail is the same in the short and longer forms, both within the stories — his creation of sharply rendered characters, his handling of narrative — and in the construction of the stories themselves — few writers can write a sentence quite so powerfully and surprisingly as Gaston.

What separates the short fiction from the novels, I believe, is appreciation of risk.

While Gaston’s longer fiction doesn’t suffer from any lack of imagination (The World, after all, begins with a house fire and includes a cross-Canada road trip, a historical document regarding the D’Arcy Island leper colony, a dying friend and a Buddhist suffering from dementia, for starters), the shorter form (and likely its attendant lack of commitment) seems to allow him freer rein to indulge even wilder flights of fancy.

A Gaston novel might be imaginative, surprising, compelling; a Gaston short story is likely to be unhinged. And that’s just part of their strength, a gloss on Gaston’s underlying skills, always in evidence.

Thus, a story which seems relatively straightforward, such as Four Corners, which follows Jack moving, over the course of an evening, toward, then away from, the action of breaking up with Cheryl, shifts almost imperceptibly from clear-eyed sobriety to the sort of heightened awareness of a drunken edge, in which the world is immeasurably warmer, and ones resolve tends to weaken. Four Corners works as well as it does because Gaston plays it completely straight: there are no stylistic flourishes or tricks, just a careful attention to voice and detail.

Similarly, Cake’s Chicken revolves around a single night in the lives of three ... well, they’re not really friends. Barely acquaintances, really. Young men on a spontaneous camping trip, which suddenly cracks open to a world of mysteries and seeming magic. Or does it? The story begins with the line “I’ve seen two things science can’t explain,” so at least the reader is warned.

The collection’s title is drawn from Any Forest Seen from Orbit, which begins, ominously, with the line, “I have been asked to ‘explain things.’ Can I say simply that I’m an animal, with urges?” The narrator is an arborist. Well, sort of. “Mostly, yes, I cut grass and rake leaves. Almost exclusively, in fact.” When he is called to work on a seventy-foot cedar, though, he is drawn in by the alluring Juliet, and, more significantly, by the tree itself. “ ... for some moments, I am unable to speak while I make my examination. I know that what I do might look like fondling, but I need to hold and to stroke, to feel most of all the bark against my cheek and, yes, my throat.”

That movement, from surface appearance to veiled uniqueness (at times bordering on oddity), might be the defining aspect of Gaston’s short fiction: his stories are distinguished by an openness to a wide spectrum of human character and behaviour, to foibles and quirks and weirdness that are all too realistic. Juliet Was a Surprise is, in its own way, a celebration of the oddness of every life, a non-judgmental reckoning. There is nothing heavy-handed about this approach, however; the stories are poised, always, at the cusp of laughter, heartbreak and mystery. To read them is a heart-opening experience.

Victoria writer Robert J. Wiersema is the author of Before I Wake and Bedtime Story. His new novel Black Feathers will be published next year.